Month: September 2017

The Federal Reserve Board has fined HSBC just over $175 million for the firm’s “unsafe and unsound practices” in its FX trading business.
The Fed says it levied the fine for deficiencies in HSBC’s oversight of, and internal controls over, FX. It adds that the firm failed to detect and address its traders misusing confidential customer information, as well as using electronic chatrooms to communicate with competitors about their trading positions.
The Board’s order requires HSBC to improve its controls and compliance risk management concerning the firm’s FX trading.

One of two banks still to settle a class action lawsuit over FX manipulation claims has agreed to pay $190 million.
Court documents filed today (September 29) show that Deutsche Bank has agreed to settle, leaving Credit Suisse as the only bank of 16 that were named in the class action yet to agree a deal. The proposed settlement remains subject to a Fairness Hearing – Deutsche has also agreed to provide “reasonable cooperation” in the continued prosecution of the Action, according to court documents.

Vietcombank says it has selected Thomson Reuters Electronic Trading (ET) to power its business in Vietnam and strengthen its presence in both the local and international foreign exchange markets.
“As the leading financial institution in Vietnam in FX and money market transactions, Vietcombank is one of the first financial institutions in Vietnam to select Conversational Dealing within Thomson Reuters FXT and Electronic Trading platforms for our interbank dealing with both domestic and international counterparties,” says Nguyen Thi Kim Oanh, deputy CEO of Vietcombank. “We believe this fruitful partnership will continue in the future, as we achieve our target of joining the ranks of the top global 300 leading financial institutions.”

This years CEMPROSPECTS conference will take place at the Hotel Placio dei Principi in Rome from October 8-10.
The event will cover energy markets of relevance to the cement industry, notably coal and petcoke, as well as freights. The conference is also of relevance for producers and traders in these markets.
Time will also be dedicated to a debate on geopolitical events happening across the globe, including the US political scene, Brexit and legislative developments in the field of CO2 and sulphur emissions.

It’s no secret that recent regulatory requirements have put FXPB business models under increased pressure. But some firms also see regulation as an opportunity to change how their businesses operate in order to win new business, as Galen Stops reports.

When questioned about the extent to which a combination of the Basel III regulations and the SNB
event had caused a contraction in the FXPB space, there was some pushback from certain service providers.

“I think that there’s a misperception that there has been a wholesale contraction in the FXPB space,” says John O’Hara, global head of FXPB and FX clearing at Societe Generale.

FXSpotStream has onboarded State Street as the latest liquidity provider to its service, hired a new CTO and revealed plans to make a new analytics suite available to its liquidity providing banks and clients.

State Street becomes the 13th bank to go live as a liquidity provider on FXSpotStream’s price aggregation service, after Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU) was added in December 2015.

“We know from client requests that liquidity from State Street will be a welcome addition to FXSpotStream’s existing bank liquidity. Our service provides State Street an expanded e-distribution network through our global connectivity network and client base. With co-location sites in New York, Tokyo and London, clients can use either our GUI or single API connection to access State Street’s liquidity,” Alan Schwarz, CEO of FXSpotStream, tells Profit & Loss.

Two of my pet hates have long been the blurring of lines between retail and institutional in FX markets, and the Fix. The start of the Mark Johnson trial, and many peoples’ reaction to it, have only served to increase my rage as it has highlighted both the increasingly loud (to my mind too loud) voice of the retail trader and the stupidity of using the Fix. Put simply, if you want a flash crash every afternoon in London listen to these people.

Integral Development has cut the fee for trading on its OCX trading platform effective immediately.
The technology provider says it will charge a flat fee of $2.75 per million, in addition the firm says it will not charge third party additional fees, port fees or market data fees.
“Our new pricing model for OCX does even more to improve the economics of running an FX business, providing a repeatable advantage in pricing and liquidity in an era of otherwise decreasing margins and increasing competition,” says Harpal Sandhu, founder and CEO of Integral.

Lucera has built out a low latency pre-trade credit control tool that is fully integrated with its LumeFX stack, in a bid to help prime services providers detect and prevent credit limit breaches.

The solution, which is already live and being used by Lucera clients, enables prime service providers the ability to get real-time alerts when one of their clients is approaching their credit limit.

“We got feedback from our clients that some of the products that they were using for pre-trade credit checking were difficult to administer or difficult to understand because they didn’t always make it clear why these credit limits were being triggered.

“Innovation is core to our business, and we strongly support OTC Exchange Network in its mission to democratise financial markets while leveraging Blockchain technology to reduce credit and settlement issues. The global foreign exchange market is a natural place to start, but we expect OTCXN to adapt its technology solutions to support additional asset classes in the near future,” says Jared Vegosen, co-founder of DV Trading.